My Story

I was born and raised in a small town between Buffalo and Niagara Falls, NY.  I moved to Long Island and the NYC area to study Astronomy at SUNY Stony Brook.  I decided to keep up Astronomy as a hobby but went into computer networking instead.  It was the late 1990's and the Internet's DotCom was in full swing.  I worked at great companies like Cabletron and Cisco.  While at Cisco I moved from NYC to the Research Triangle Park portion of Central North Carolina.  Here I settled in with my wife and we raised our four children.

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I picked up my hobby again during the 2005-2006 apparition of Mars with a Celestron C8i SE.  I love that scope and still have it today.  That Mars season put me down the slippery slope of planetary imaging.  I started with webcams and then went after faster and faster shutter rates.  Then as I realized I was mostly limited by the aperture, I wanted a bigger telescope.  A Celestron C14 was, and still is, the top end of what is really portable but I wanted active cooling and couldn't bear to cut holes in a new telescope.

 

Around 2010 I worked with the greats such as Anthony Wesley to figure out how to build a big Newtonian.    Building my own 14" f/4.5 scope made me quite proud.  I started with a Celestron CGE but designed it to the max capacity of 65lbs.  This really was pushing my luck but I didn't mind the slop of movement and guiding as I was primarily interested in planetary work where guiding accuracy is not needed as much.  I did discover that I can see to very faint magnitudes with DSLRs and then upgraded to an SBIG CCD to go after galaxies, Deep Space Objects as well as minor planets and comets!

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This too got me hooked and now I have upgraded the CGE to an iOptron CEM120 which is just beastly and I love it. 

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  Clear Skies,

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     Mike